Art in exile on show at London’s Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale

With Iran’s official cultural presence on the international stage increasingly uncertain, the 6th Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale in London, With My Roots, carries significance that extends well beyond the gallery walls.

Held at Mall Galleries from May 22–30, it brings together more than 100 Iranian artists from 17 countries, with over 180 works spanning painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. Despite its scale, the exhibition feels intimate: a space where Iranian culture emerges not as a single story, but as a field of tensions, inheritances and unresolved attachments.

Iran’s withdrawal from the Venice Biennale earlier this year exposed how fragile national representation has become, at a moment when art and geopolitics are increasingly difficult to separate.

Read more: What Iran’s absence from the Venice Biennale reveals about art and politics

Against that silence, this biennale tells a different – and in many ways more urgent – story. It shows how Iranian art continues to circulate when official platforms falter, and why independent cultural infrastructures matter in moments of political and material crisis.

Founded in 2016 by curator Marina Panahi through the gallery Capital Art London, the Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale has become a rare meeting point for artists inside Iran and across the diaspora. It brings together communities separated by migration, sanctions, censorship and political borders.

The biennale foregrounds tensions central to Iranian modern and contemporary experience: homeland and exile, tradition and modernity, visibility and erasure. These curatorial themes reflect the realities of artists working inside Iran. Censorship, economic pressure and restricted mobility shape their daily practice.

These themes also reflect those in the diaspora for whom distance can be both a wound and a resource. Their work often carries the pull of elsewhere: the longing for Iran, the act of translation, and the unsettled feeling of belonging in more than one place. The biennale brings such experiences together without collapsing them into a single story.

But this year, these tensions have sharpened. War, internet restrictions, disrupted phone lines, suspended flights and mounting economic pressure made even the movement of artworks from Iran to London difficult.

Works that might once have moved through ordinary shipping routes had to travel through more fragile and improvised channels. The exhibition’s existence is therefore part of its meaning. The works on display are examples of persistence under pressure.

That persistence is economic as well as symbolic. Because the works are for sale, the biennale can offer artists an economic lifeline at a time when sanctions, currency collapse and restricted exchange have made producing and selling art increasingly difficult.

The art market is often viewed with suspicion, especially when politically charged work enters systems of taste, ownership and value. Yet for many artists, sales can mean the ability to keep working and remain connected to a wider cultural economy.

This produces one of the exhibition’s most compelling tensions: the desire to enter the global art market without being consumed by it.

A global perspective

Iranian artists have long had to navigate the expectations of international audiences who often approach their work through familiar frames of politics, gender, conflict or cultural heritage.

The exhibition’s breadth is central to the resistance to conform to such expectations. Bringing together artists from Iran, the UK and 14 countries across Europe, North America and the Middle East, the variety of works mirrors the diversity of Iranian culture and society itself.

It also places established figures such as Simin Keramati and photographer Armin Amirian in dialogue with artists still building their international profile. This gives the exhibition historical depth while foregrounding practices that may not otherwise reach global audiences.

But even an exhibition of more than 100 artists can still only offer a partial view. For every work that reaches London, many others remain unseen – held back by closed borders, limited resources, fear, bureaucracy or the simple impossibility of getting work out.

The exhibition is shaped around two main curatorial themes: Eternal Iran and Art of Conflict. Together, they show the different tensions running through the show.

Eternal Iran focuses on cultural inheritance. It looks at how Iranian identity has lasted and changed across generations, political systems and countries. Tradition here isn’t frozen in the past, but something alive. Artists treat calligraphy, poetry, myth and visual symbols as tools they can reshape, break apart and rebuild in new ways.

By contrast, Art of Conflict confronts the violence of the present more directly. It includes paintings, photographs and prints by 19 artists currently living in Iran and experiencing recent violence and war firsthand.

This section features photographs by Majid Saeedi, Alireza Memariani and Shahla Khodadadi, alongside battlefield photography by Maryam Saeedpoor and Maryam Rahmanian. These works bring a different register into the exhibition, being produced in proximity to instability, fear and loss.

The contrast between Eternal Iran and Art of Conflict gives the biennale much of its force. One section turns towards memory and the deep histories of Iranian culture; the other confronts the violence and uncertainty of the present. Together, they refuse an easy division between Iran as ancient civilisation and Iran as contemporary crisis. Both are true. Both are incomplete without the other.

This tension becomes especially vivid in Homa Bazrafshan’s Iran is a Vineyard Herself. The work evokes both fertility and mourning. Its vials of red liquid, which read visually as blood, suggest a memorial language without reducing the piece to a single political message. The vineyard, usually a symbol of cultivation and abundance, becomes a field of grief as well as endurance.

Panahi describes the biennale as an opportunity for audiences to move “outside the language of politics and conflict” and hear the voices of Iranian artists worldwide.

That ambition refuses to let politics become the only language through which Iran is understood.

At a time when Iran is often made visible only through crisis, the exhibition asks viewers to look slowly, to recognise historical depth without romanticising it, and to encounter conflict without allowing it to become the whole story.

This biennale is a reminder that Iranian art is not absent from the global stage. It is just moving through more precarious routes, carried by the artists, curators and communities who are determined that it should still be seen.

With My Roots is on show at Mall Galleries, London until May 30 2026.

Katayoun Shahandeh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.